Multiculturalism And Magic Realism Between Fiction And Reality

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Regensburg (Anglistik), 190 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Since the 1970s, there has been an increasing concern with the impact of colonialism and postcolonialism on British identities and culture and the influence that the former British Empire had and still has on people in the former colonies and in Britain today. Novels like Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" or "The Satanic Verses", Hanif Kureishi's "The Buddha of Suburbia", Meera Syal's "Anita and Me", Timothy Mo's "Sour Sweet", Sam Selvon's "The Lonely Londoners" and Monica Ali's "Brick Lane" along with films like "Bend it like Beckham" or TV series like "The Kumars at No. 42" and "Da Ali G Show" exemplify this rather new phenomenon and its world-wide success. They are representative of a large group of multicultural novels and productions created during the last few decades. Although multiculturalism is not new in the media, there has been a special boom of writers of the "empire within" during the last ten years.

Since the 1970s, there has been increasing concern with the impact of (post)colonialism on British identities and culture. White Teeth by Zadie Smith is the story of three families from three different cultural backgrounds, set mostly in multicultural London. The first part of this book provides an overview of the former British Empire, the Commonwealth and the history of Bangladesh, Jamaica and the Jews in England as relevant to White Teeth. Following this, the role of the (former) centre of London will be presented. Subsequently, definitions and postcolonial theories (Bhabha, Said etc.) shall be discussed.The focus of this book is on life in multicultural London. The main aspects analysed in these chapters deal with identity, the location where the novel is set and racism. A further aim of the book is a comparison between the fictional world of White Teeth and reality. One chapter is devoted to the question of magic realism and the novel's position between two worlds.In a summary, the writer hopes to convince the readers of the fascination felt when reading the novel and when plunging into the buzzing streets of contemporary multicultural London.

Bhikhu Parekh argues for a pluralist perspective on cultural diversity. Writing from both within the liberal tradition and outside of it as a critic, he challenges what he calls the "moral monism" of much of traditional moral philosophy, including contemporary liberalism--its tendency to assert that only one way of life or set of values is worthwhile and to dismiss the rest as misguided or false. He defends his pluralist perspective both at the level of theory and in subtle nuanced analyses of recent controversies. Thus, he offers careful and clear accounts of why cultural differences should be respected and publicly affirmed, why the separation of church and state cannot be used to justify the separation of religion and politics, and why the initial critique of Salman Rushdie (before a Fatwa threatened his life) deserved more serious attention than it received. Rejecting naturalism, which posits that humans have a relatively fixed nature and that culture is an incidental, and "culturalism," which posits that they are socially and culturally constructed with only a minimal set of features in common, he argues for a dialogic interplay between human commonalities and cultural differences. This will allow, Parekh argues, genuinely balanced and thoughtful compromises on even the most controversial cultural issues in the new multicultural world in which we live.

This book follows the hybrid and contradictory history of magic realism through the writings of three key figures – art historian Franz Roh, novelist Alejo Carpentier, and cultural critic Fredric Jameson – drawing links between their political, aesthetic, and philosophical ideas on art’s relationship to reality. Magic realism is vast in scope, spanning almost a century, and is often confused with neighbouring styles of literature or art, most notably surrealism. The fascinating conditions of modernist Europe are complex and contradictory, a spirit that magic realism has taken on as it travels far and wide. The filmmakers and writers in this book acknowledge the importance of feeling, atmosphere, and mood to subtly provoke and resist global capitalism. Theirs is the history of magic-realist cinema. The book explores this history through the modernist avant-garde in search of a new theory of cinematic magic realism. It uncovers a resistant, geopolitical form of world cinema – moving from Europe, through Latin America and the former Soviet Union, to Thailand – that emerges from these ideas. This book is invaluable to any reader interested in world modernism(s) in relation to contemporary cinema and geopolitics. Its sustained analysis of film as a sensory, intermedial medium is of interest to scholars working across the visual arts, literature, critical theory, and film-philosophy.

With the increasing interest of pop culture and academia towards environmental issues, which has simultaneously given rise to fiction and artworks dealing with interdisciplinary issues, climate change is an undeniable reality of our time. In accordance with the severe environmental degradation and health crises today, including the COVID-19 pandemic, human beings are awakening to this reality through climate fiction (cli-fi), which depicts ways to deal with the anthropogenic transformations on Earth through apocalyptic worlds as displayed in works of literature, media and art. Appealing to a wide range of readers, from NGOs to students, this book fills a gap in the fields of literature, media and art, and sheds light on the inevitable interconnection of humankind with the nonhuman environment through effective descriptions of associable conditions in the works of climate fiction.

Magic realism has long been treated as a phenomenon restricted to postcolonial literature. Drawing on works from Britain, Lies that Tell the Truth compellingly shows how magic realist fiction can be produced also at what is usually considered to be the cultural centre without forfeiting the mode’s postcolonial attitude and aims. A close analysis of works by Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Robert Nye and others reveals how the techniques of magic realism generate a complex critique of the West’s rational-empirical worldview from within a Western context itself. Understanding magic realism as a fictional analogue of anthropology and sociology, Lies that Tell the Truth reads the mode as a frequently humorous but at the same time critical investigation into people’s attempts to make sense of their world. By laying bare the manifold strategies employed to make meaning, magic realist fiction indicates that knowledge and reality cannot be reduced to hard facts, but that people’s dreams and fears, ideas, stories and beliefs must equally be taken into account.

This book rethinks the origins and nature of magical realism and provides detailed readings of key novels by Asturias, Carpentier, Garcia Marquez, Rushdie, and Okri. Identifying two different strands of the mode, one characterised by faith, the other by irreverence, Warnes makes available a new vocabulary for the discussion of magical realism.